The original idea for this story came a little less than a year ago when my mom told me about one of the experiences she’d had while working as an associate at one of the local schools. While I won’t go into any specific details (it’s neither appropriate really nor do I know much about the situation) I will say that the experience is basically summed up in Dan’s portion of the story.
I worked on the idea for a bit at first but didn’t find myself going anywhere and shelved it for a later date. It stayed in this state until I read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. While I can’t say it’s the best book I’ve ever read it did have some very interesting things in a literary sense. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, specifically interested me. Nathan Zuckerman had been described as Philip Roth’s alter-ego and, as such, is in a sense a version of Philip Roth’s voice (or so I’ve come to understand). If you don’t know me very well then I’ll say that that’s what Justin was set up to be in this story. It allowed me a bit more freedom than I would have had otherwise and the ability to better deal with the inevitable mistakes that would show up (example: Jessica’s hair).
I knew I wanted Justin’s voice to reminisce about a time in his past but realized that Dan’s story wouldn’t work by itself. I didn’t know enough about the real event to be able to make it into fifty thousand words and, though Justin shares my own voice in a way, we aren’t the same person. Dan’s story just wasn’t interesting enough to Justin, he didn’t experience the events first hand and so the issue was outside of his influences really. If the voice I had chosen was Harold or someone else intimately involved with the situation this issue, likely, wouldn’t exist.
In an attempt to make it his interest I decided that the setting needed to be inside the school during a snowstorm. It’s a very well established situation that sort of forces confrontation and, inherently, brings out the skeletons in people’s closets. Even still I couldn’t make Dan’s story the focus and introduced Mrs. Snowburn’s passing as the Justin’s reason for writing the story. Beyond that I took the story day by day and explored the reasons why each of the characters had found themselves in the school when the storm hit.
That’s where, I think, I made my largest mistake. While this story may have its interesting points and moves generally forward all of the other characters became distractions from the main plot of Justin and Mrs. Snowburn. In that sense I will keep this story, but in future revisions will cut back on the other characters drastically.
This doesn’t mean that they will be taken out of the story or that, if they are, they will be forgotten completely. I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to approach the story in the future or exactly what I will do with it, though I think I have the ground work set in pretty nicely. I do know that Tim and Jessica are likely to be taken out. They don’t need to be stuck in the school with Justin and Mrs. Snowburn. They need to be the stars of their own story. Dan and his family will likely be taken out as well and placed in the back of my mind for a later date again. The potential of his story was not realized completely and I don’t want it to be less than it can be. Sean may stay but Ms. George will not be present. I didn’t like the story they had and will make efforts to create something I can live with instead of what is there now. Claire and Johnny may remain but I don’t know in what capacity. I may add new characters that can function in different ways or it may just be Justin and Mrs. Snowburn. I really don’t know.
Right now the story is a lot of character development which, in all honesty, doesn’t feel like a true story. I want this to eventually be a story that doesn’t get distracted by things that should, ultimately, be somewhere else. I think there are some very powerful moments that are lost because I had to spend time legitimizing other’s presence. Until I can get that to work properly I have to lessen the number of distracting influences and keep Justin’s focus on Mrs. Snowburn’s passing, which ultimately means cutting some characters from the story.
~Bret Cath
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